The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  In the deep calm of the opium, Menelaus managed to recall, without so much as a quiver of resentment, how Helen had tried to the very last to bring ruin upon the Greeks. It was thanks to her that Anticlus had been strangled. But if Odysseus hadn’t strangled him, if one of the heroes had answered her alluring voice, they might all have been burned alive in the belly of the horse. Or the Trojans would have thought up some other horrible death for them. Yet Menelaus recounted the episode, in front of Helen and their guests, as though it were an image of glory, to be savored with pleasure.

  Twenty years later, Menelaus had understood a thing or two about the woman beside him. He no longer thought of punishing her, as he had for so many years and so obsessively fantasized. He was happy to have understood of her what amounted to no more than the hem of her tunic. And this, among other things, was what he had understood: that for Greeks and Trojans alike Helen had posed the danger of the phantom, the image. Living with the phantom is ruinous, but neither of the two sides had wanted to live without. It was over the phantom they had fought. And now the phantom went on threatening and enchanting life in Greece.

  The night Troy was put to the torch, Helen had pushed the danger for both Greeks and Trojans to the limit, for this was of her essence. She insinuated her voice into the seething dark of the horse, shaking the soul of the Achaean warriors. Then, just a few moments later, while dancing on the Acropolis with the other Trojan women, she waved the torch that was to signal to the other Achaeans waiting on their ships that it was time to attack. Two incompatible actions, one right after the other. Helen performed them both with the same serenity. Those two actions were Helen. Never as on that night did Helen reveal herself so completely, a great, intoxicating moon radiating its light impartially on all.

  What is the evil of exile? “One and terrible,” claims Polynices: “not having freedom of speech [parrēsía].” And his mother, Iocasta, adds: “Not to say what one thinks is the way of the servant.” Frankness, that first feature of the aristocratic ethic, becomes secularized with democracy into freedom of speech. Odysseus steered clear of both. He renounced the frankness of the warrior when he pretended to be crazy so as not to sail for Troy; he renounced freedom of speech when he played the part of the wandering beggar who could be told to shut up and sent packing by the merest servant.

  Odysseus was the first to have mediation triumph over the immediate, postponement over presence, the twisted mind over straightforwardness. All the character traits that would be assigned over the centuries to the merchant, the foreigner, the Jew, the traveling player were coined by Odysseus in himself. He looked ahead to a human condition in which neither aristocratic frankness nor democratic freedom of speech would be enough. Many centuries later, that condition seems normal, but in Odysseus’s time it was a foresight granted only to one who had traveled a great deal between earth and heaven. So, whereas Achilles and Agamemnon stand out in our memories as leftovers of another creation, consumed by catastrophe, Odysseus is still familiar to us, a sort of invisible companion. The presence he renounced in its immediacy is redeemed in the stream of memory and history. Achilles has to be evoked; Odysseus is already at our side, wherever we are, whatever the circumstances.

  Throughout Odysseus’s life, and above all during the long years of the voyage back from Troy, there was a constant whispered exchange between himself and Athena. Nothing happened to the hero without that whisper being part of it. Only once did it peter out altogether. Then Odysseus had to find his way back to another female voice, even more remote, a voice beyond which all voices fall silent. He was clutching the raft he’d built with his own hands on Calypso’s island. Huge waves battered the mast. Naked, clinging to a few planks of wood, he might have been the first or last man on the waters of the flood. He couldn’t hear Athena’s voice. Then, looking up amid the whirling foam, he saw a white sea gull on the top of the mast, and in its beak it held a purple ribbon.

  That ribbon, incongruous in the storm, reminded him of something. It was absurd trying to remember what, when at any moment a wave might submerge his raft forever. But Odysseus was determined he would remember. One day, in Samothrace, when he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, some nameless person had come up to him and tied a purple sash around his waist, the krdemnon. And that sash now seemed to be fluttering in the sea gull’s beak. Odysseus realized that only a veil lay between him and death, and that veil was initiation. When everything is reduced to its most basic and is about to be swallowed up, there is still a ribbon fluttering in the dark.

  Instead of protecting himself from the waves, Odysseus exposed himself by reaching out an arm to take the purple ribbon from the sea gull’s beak. Then he tied it around his waist. He repeated the ritual of Samothrace, but this time the nameless person’s hands were his own. For years that purple ribbon that saved Odysseus from shipwreck had been tied around the hair of Leucothea, the White Goddess. And before becoming the goddess who rises from the watery depths to rescue sailors, Leucothea had been a poor mad woman who drowned herself, throwing herself into the sea from a cliff, her infant child in her arms. At the time her name was Ino; she was one of the four daughters of Cadmus and wife of King Athamas. During her mother Harmony’s lifetime, and perhaps partly because Harmony “knew of many crimes committed in the past by barbarians and Greeks,” the most heterogeneous and remote elements had agreed to submit to the same yoke. Afterward, during the lifetime of her daughters, every unity was torn apart and dismembered, as if the gods had wanted to have everybody appreciate, and fast, that the harmonious yoke that binds disparate elements is the most precarious form of all.

  Ino was the last of Cadmus’s daughters to go crazy and kill. She had seen her mother reduced to ashes, had seen Agave cut her son Pentheus to pieces, had seen Autonoë pick up the remains of the stag that had been her son Actaeon, torn apart by Artemis’s dogs. All these horrors had been reflected in Ino’s eyes before being repeated one last time with herself when she plunged the little Melicertes into a caldron of boiling water, while her other son, Learchus, was run through by his father, Athamas. Yet this princess who committed suicide was saved, and became herself a savior. Why? She had shown kindness to the orphaned Dionysus; she had disguised him as a little girl in her palace; she had given him her white breast just as she did to her own son Melicertes; she had hidden him in a dark room wrapped in a purple veil while Mystis the serving maid gave him his first taste of the sound of the cymbals and tambourines and offered him his mystical objects as toys. But it wasn’t only Dionysus who remembered Ino. Aphrodite remembered her too. “Spuma fui,” “I was foam myself,” the goddess said to Poseidon, encouraging him to accept Ino among the divinities of the sea. That foam was the ribbon in Leucothea’s hair; it was the veil around the hips of the initiates in Samothrace; it was the slow upward spreading of the light as the hidden is made plain in the dawn; it was the whiteness of appearance itself and the sovereign purple of blood; it was the only veil that is laid over the shipwreck.

  The veil, or something that encloses, that wraps around, or belts on, a ribbon, a sash, a band, is the last object we meet in Greece. Beyond the veil, there is no other thing. The veil is the other. It tells us that the existing world, alone, cannot hold, that at the very least it needs to be continually covered and discovered, to appear and to disappear. That which is accomplished, be it initiation, or marriage, or sacrifice, requires a veil, precisely because that which is accomplished is perfect, and the perfect stands for everything, and everything includes the veil, that surplus which is the fragrance of things.

  No one was ever lonelier than Calypso. From the mouth of her cave she watched the violet waves, knowing that none of the other gods was interested in her. Behind her she heard the whirlpool bubbling deep underground, throwing water up to the surface in four directions. Divine hostess, time denied her any guests. But why was the sea around her so empty, why didn’t the smoke of sacrifices rise to her from the lands of the earth? Calypso’s distance fro
m the world wasn’t only to be measured across the huge expanse of the waters but first and foremost across time. Like her father, Atlas, “who knows all the depths of the sea” and watches over the great columns that separate earth and sky, Calypso lived at a point of cosmic intersection: Ogygia was a primordial island, not to be confused with any other, just as the water of the Styx, which dissolved any and every material and frightened even the Olympians, was not to be confused with any other water. But no one paid any attention to these places. They were orphans of a lost era, of the usurped realm of Kronos. These days the gods sat on a mountain and sparkled in the light.

  Calypso means “She Who Conceals Things.” Concealment was her passion, cloaking something in a veil, like the veils she sometimes wore around her head. But she was given nothing to conceal, apart from the constant mingling of the heavenly and earthly waters beneath her cave, a dull roar she could perfectly well distinguish from that of the sea before her. As a little girl she had played on flowery meadows with Persephone and other Nymphs. Now the only beings she ever saw were the two maids who served her and the birds perched on the dark trees around her cave. Toward Calypso, Odysseus felt the same attraction Gilgamesh had felt for the barmaid Siduri, for the woman who pours drinks behind a counter and talks, listens. What did that attraction conceal? Odysseus knew what would later be forgotten: it concealed the woman who welcomes us at the entrance to the kingdom of the dead.

  In that world between worlds, suspended, the only place one might delude oneself, one was beyond life and beyond death, one drinks and plays dice. The conversation with the woman who pours the drinks goes on and on through an endless night, unthreatened by any dawn on the window-panes. After Odysseus, men would forget: but they still felt an obscure attraction to hostesses, barmaids, as if every counter where drinks are poured were the threshold to another world.

  Odysseus spent seven years with Calypso, long enough for many of his subjects to decide to consider him lost. They were years when time sucked him backward into a fabulous prison that was also a floating sepulcher. If he looked at the ground he saw violets and lovage, plants usually strewn about the dead. If he raised his eyes he saw alders, cypresses, black poplars, willows: the trees of the dead. And everything had a primordial beauty that left even the gods amazed. Talking to Achilles in Hades, Odysseus had come up against the horror of death. Now, all around him, he found another death, one that presented itself in the uncertain guise of a better life but was in fact a static wallowing in time. For Odysseus knew that there was no better life. Like the Elysian Fields and the garden of the Hesperides, Ogygia was a place to acquire knowledge but not a place where you could live. Day after day, crouching on the beach, Odysseus told Calypso about the Trojan War. With a stick, he drew the positions of the camps and the armies in the sand. Every time he spoke, he changed the story or the way he told it. Calypso sat next to him, silent, concentrating. Then a wave bigger than the others would erase the lines in the sand. Once Calypso said to him: “You see, that’s what the sea does. And you want to trust your life to the sea?” After that Odysseus didn’t go to the beach with her anymore. Now he sat alone, on a rock, the most exposed rock of all, and wept. At sundown he returned to the cave as if after a day’s work. And every evening it was the same. Sitting on his golden stool, Odysseus would reach across the table for his human food. It had been placed next to the ambrosia and red nectar Calypso ate as she sat opposite, watching him. Every evening for seven years Calypso hoped Odysseus would try her food. Then he would become immortal, ageless, a semigod lost at the boundaries of the world. But Odysseus never touched it. Later they would twine their bodies together in the bed at the back of the cave, and on those nights Calypso would feel she was truly alive, because she was concealing Odysseus between her big body and the bedclothes. The rest of the time she was oppressed by melancholy and doubt, as if her life were no more real than the names of the warriors Odysseus spoke of, names that had now become familiar, impalpable presences for her.

  When Calypso told him she was going to let him leave, Odysseus suspected her words might conceal some other trick to trap him there, “some other evil.” They were enemies fighting it out to the last with their respective weapons, in silence and without witnesses. Feeling a stab of tenderness, Calypso called Odysseus alitrós, “rascal,” and “she caressed him with her hand.” Odysseus would never hear another woman use a word at once so intimate and so accurate.

  A cousin of Helen, Penelope was given as a bride to the swift, sturdy suitor who had raced faster than all the others, Odysseus. Her father, Icarius, wasn’t happy with the marriage. He followed the couple and stopped them when they were already some distance from Sparta. But Penelope stood her ground. She was a stubborn duck.

  Years later, when Odysseus was still fighting beneath the walls of Troy, somebody arrived claiming he was dead. Penelope in desperation threw herself into the sea, but a flock of ducks followed her beneath the water and pulled her up, gripping her sodden clothes in their beaks.

  Pan, the wildest and most bestial of the gods, Pan the masturbator, the terrorizer, chose as his mother the woman who for centuries people would point to as an example of chastity and faithfulness: Penelope. There are two versions of the story of Pan’s birth. Some claimed that when Odysseus got back to Ithaca he found “his house infested from top to bottom by lecherous thieves of women.” In the middle of them was Penelope, “the Bassarid, the whorish fox, who majestically keeps her brothel and empties all the rooms of their riches, pouring away the wretched man’s wealth in her banquets.” The wretched man was her husband, Odysseus. So the hero threw her out. She’d have to go back to the father she had once been happy to leave, clinging to her spouse. Thus it was that Penelope saw the Spartan plain again and the mountains that encircled it. On the highlands of Mantinea she made love with Hermes. And, after giving birth to Pan, she died. Pan has run about playing his pipes on the crags of Arcadia ever since.

  Others said that, when Odysseus got back to Ithaca, Penelope had already let all one hundred and eight suitors have their way with her. And they were the fathers of Pan. Odysseus’s footsteps echoed in the desolate corridors of the palace, as the suitors lay drenched in blood and Penelope slept on. He opened the door to a room he didn’t remember being there. It was completely empty. In the darkness a child with a sly look on his face was watching him. Two delicate horns sprouted from his curls, and his feet were like a goat’s. Two shiny hooves poked out from the hare’s pelt the baby Pan was wrapped in. Odysseus immediately closed the door. Without saying a word, he went down to the harbor and once again set sail from Ithaca. He didn’t know where to, and this time he was alone.

  The suitors’ bodies made a carpet of flesh, blood, gore, and dust. Outside the palace hall, in the courtyard, the twelve unfaithful serving maids swung in the wind, hanged. Everything else was still, save for the jaws of the dogs fighting over Melanthius’s testicles and penis.

  Penelope slept on. Her sleep this morning was the sweetest she’d had in twenty years. She sank into irresponsible pleasure, let a weight force itself down on her eyelids, while from behind the door and through the thick walls came the thud of falling bodies and the high-pitched twang of the bow. When Eurycleia woke her, saying that Odysseus had come back and killed the suitors, Penelope was scornful of the old woman’s excitement and dishevelment. For Penelope immediacy was an evil. All her life had been a shrewd avoidance of immediacy. And just as her husband, Odysseus, used to lower his eyes so he could think, his face hidden from all around him, so Penelope, on coming down the big stairway, would lift her tunic up over her cheeks so as to give nothing away in her expression. But now she must go down there again, to greet—they said—the newly returned Odysseus.

  The hall was empty and smelled of sulfur. The men had been using sulfur and fire to try to hide the stench of slaughtered flesh. Penelope and Odysseus found themselves sitting down face to face in the glow of the fire. Once again Odysseus lowered his eyes. Penelope’s gaz
e ran over him feature by feature. In that moment of mute tension they were at once close and hostile as never before. They were two “hearts of iron,” two beings walled up behind the defenses of the mind, occasionally using the weapons of strength and beauty but then immediately withdrawing to their invisible fortresses. Long used to the solitary life, they were reluctant to recognize someone with whom to share their own monologues. Penelope is described as períphrōn, echéphrōn; Odysseus as polýmētis—all words that suggest the supremacy of mind: as artificer of a shrewd control, in Penelope’s case, of constant and complex invention in Odysseus’s. More than the complicity of the flesh, they shared the complicity of intelligence. But intelligence is isolated and distrustful; thus, before recognizing each other, they clashed.

  Their son Telemachus couldn’t understand this. He was angry with his mother for being so cold. Penelope answered that she would only feel able to recognize Odysseus if he gave her one of the “signs that only they knew about.” Upon which, a small smile crossed Odysseus’s face. Yes, Penelope too wanted to “put him to the test.” That, in the end, was the one constant in his life. Even Athena, the goddess who protected him, had allowed the suitors to insult him so that “sorrow might bite even deeper into the heart of Odysseus, son of Laertes.” And right to the end, when the battle with the suitors had already begun and in the form of a swallow the goddess was perched on a beam to watch the massacre, even then she had chosen to “put his strength and courage to the test.” One after another, favors and desertions formed an unending series of ups and downs in his life, the only link between the two being Odysseus’s capacity to endure both good fortune and bad. Every good and bad fortune is a test: the sovereignty of the mind lies in recognizing them, in dealing with them as such, in getting through them with the secretly indifferent curiosity of the traveler.